Residents of the small Quebec town where a train carrying crude crashed and killed as many as 50 people are calling on the head of the railway to take more responsibility after he said an engineer failed to set the hand brakes on the runaway train.

“It’s very questionable whether the hand brakes were properly applied on this train,” Edward Burkhardt, chief executive officer of Rail World Inc., owner of Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway Ltd., told reporters yesterday. “As a matter of fact, I’ll say they weren’t, otherwise we wouldn’t have had this incident.”

Burkhardt paid his first visit to Lac-Mégantic, Quebec four days after an unmanned, 72-car oil train rolled from an overnight parking spot into the center of town, where it jumped the tracks, caught fire and incinerated about 30 buildings.

About 50 people, many of whom were at the Musi-Café bar near the train tracks, are “probably dead,” said Chief Inspector Michel Forget of the Sûreté du Québec police. Twenty bodies have been recovered, he said yesterday.

Burkhardt laid the blame for the crash on his own engineer for failing to properly apply hand brakes on the rail cars when they were parked in the nearby village of Nantes. He said his company’s inspection indicated the brakes were applied on the locomotives, but not on the rail cars.

Burkhardt said the train’s engineer told the company he had applied 11 hand brakes.

“We think he applied some hand brakes, the question is, did he apply enough of them?” Burkhardt said. “He’s told us that he applied 11 hand brakes and our general feeling now is that that is not true. Initially we took him at his word.”

Employee suspended

The engineer has been suspended, he said. The Canadian Press and other media outlets have identified the engineer as Tom Harding of Farnham, Quebec. Burkhardt didn’t name the engineer. Cathy Aldana, vice president of research and administration at Rail World, said she didn’t know the employee’s identity. Calls to a Tom Harding in Farnham weren’t answered.

It was unprofessional for Burkhardt to blame his employee, said Jean Saint Pierre, who runs a head-hunting company from Lac-Mégantic.

“The only professional way to act is to say, ‘there’s an enquiry, we will collaborate with the police and all those guys,” Saint Pierre said. “Only a cowboy would say ‘‘Ok, I decide my employee has done this or that.’’

Other residents called on Burkhardt and his company to take financial responsibility for the disaster. ‘‘He’s the one who says it costs too much and makes cuts to people manning the train,’’ said Francois Dion, a former steel worker and resident of the area. ‘‘He needs to pay the price.’’

Burkhardt, 74, a railroad industry veteran who has served as Rail World’s CEO since forming it in 1999, was heckled by locals as he answered reporters’ questions. He said in an interview this week before leaving Chicago, where Rail World is based, that he had received death threats and ‘‘a whole bunch of hate mail” since the incident. The center of town remains a crime scene and is closed off. About 2,000 people, or a third of the town near the Maine border, were forced to evacuate although many have since returned home.

While leaving locomotives running overnight with no one aboard is standard practice, Montreal Maine won’t do so again, Burkhardt said in the interview. “We’re going to tighten up our procedures,” he said. “I expect there will be a push to tighten up regulation as well. I support that.”

Unattended locomotive

Burkhardt said firefighters responding to a fire on the train’s parked locomotive after the engineer left for the night may have switched it off, causing the air brakes to release. He told reporters in Lac-Mégantic that a track foreman who boarded the train with the firefighers wouldn’t have recognized the significance of the engines being turned off because he isn’t familiar with diesel locomotives.

“Nothing the firefighters did could have put the train in jeopardy,” Patrick Lambert, the fire chief in Nantes, where the train was left, said in response on the CBC network.

The crash in Lac-Mégantic, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) east of Montreal, was the country’s deadliest rail disaster since a 1986 collision in Alberta between a Canadian National Railway Co. freight train and a VIA Rail passenger train that killed 23 people.

War zone

Burkhardt, who said he planned to spend yesterday and today in the town, said the scene “looks like a war zone,” echoing comments by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper during an earlier visit. Burkhardt said he didn’t arrive in the town earlier as he felt he could be more effective working from Chicago and not distract emergency crews dealing with the accident.

“I feel absolutely awful about this, I’m devastated,” he said.

Asked how he would react if criminal charges are laid, “if that’s the case, let the chips fall where they may,” he said. “I can’t draw the line between carelessness and criminal negligence.”

Montreal Maine’s U.S. accident rates exceed the average for commercial railroads operating in the country for at least the past decade, according to data compiled by the Federal Railroad Administration.

Rates have exceeded the national average in all except one of the past 10 years, FRA data show. In 2006, when Montreal Maine had 75.9 reported incidents per million train miles, the highest in that span, the average for the 730 railroads operating in the U.S. was 16.6.

Safety record

Comparing Montreal Maine’s safety statistics to larger railroads is unfair because a single accident has a disproportionate effect for the smaller carrier, Burkhardt said.

Montreal Maine owns about 510 miles (821 kilometers) of track in Maine and Vermont in the U.S. and Quebec and New Brunswick in Canada, according to its website. That compares to a 21,000-mile network for CSX Corp., the largest railroad operating primarily in the eastern U.S.

“We’ve had a steadily improving safety record there,” the executive said in the interview. “It had always been an emphasis.”

1996 derailment

Burkhardt said the situation at Lac-Mégantic differs from a 1996 derailment at another railroad he was running. He was chief executive officer of Wisconsin Central Transportation Corp. when a train carrying liquid petroleum gas and propane burst into flames after jumping the tracks in Weyauwega, Wisconsin, according to a U.S. National Transportation Safety Board report. While no one was killed, 3,155 people had to be evacuated.

The NTSB blamed the crash in the town, about 193 kilometers northwest of Milwaukee, on improper track maintenance that led to a broken rail. The Wisconsin Central workers in charge of inspecting the track weren’t properly trained, the agency said.

“The circumstances were completely different,” Burkhardt said. “Lac-Mégantic was not an infrastructure problem at all.”

In Lac-Mégantic, Burkhardt said he’s setting up a claims office where its insurer will receive claims and begin to process them immediately. He’s also working with the Red Cross to ensure people who were forced to evacuate have proper clothing, food and shelter before rebuilding begins.

“We have a lot of work to do with the people in this town who are, frankly, mad as hell right now,” Burkhardt said. “Understandably so.”

While residents said they were glad Burkhardt visited the town, they’re still looking for more information about the crash.

’’Just give us a good answer, tell us the truth, we want to know what really happened,’’ said Chantalle Pratte, 42-year-old resident of the town.

By Andrew Mayeda, Lauren S Murphy and Hugo Miller, with assistance from Aoyon Ashraf, Lauren S Murphy and Gerrit De Vynck in Toronto, Angela Greiling Keane in Washington, Theophilos Argitis in Ottawa and Tim Catts in New York.

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